Two boys rescued from Venezuela quake rubble among 33 survivors

At least 33 people were pulled alive from collapsed buildings over the weekend after Venezuela’s twin earthquakes, including an infant and two 11-year-old boys. One of the boys was found about 3 metres deep in the rubble after rescuers used a scanner, a rare breakthrough as the search tightened around the hardest-hit coastal state of La Guaira, just north of Caracas.

The back-to-back 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude quakes struck late Wednesday. The first 48 to 72 hours after a disaster are the narrow window when survival chances fall quickly. That urgency shaped the weekend operation, as thousands of volunteers, family members and rescue crews kept digging through damaged neighborhoods by hand while hopes for more survivors were fading.

The work was slowed by a shortage of heavy machinery in the hardest-hit zones. Residents and volunteers saw too few official rescue teams at first, so civilians, including medical students, joined the search with drills, hammers and picks. More than 770 buildings were partially or completely destroyed, adding to the scale of the collapse faced by searchers in La Guaira.

Delcy Rodríguez first praised civilian volunteers, then authorities restricted access to La Guaira because road traffic was interfering with emergency vehicles. Jorge Rodríguez put the death toll at 920 and said more than 50,000 people were missing, while a later update placed the number of dead at least 1,450 as search operations continued.

Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, called it a very complex emergency response. The United States, the European Union and several countries moved to send aid and rescue teams, including Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Spain, Portugal, India and Switzerland.

UNICEF said 3.9 million children live in the affected areas and that contaminated water and disease could trigger a second crisis.